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Washington Post
November 14, 2001
Americans Will Get A Chance to Quiz Putin
NPR's Exclusive Chat Includes a Caller Q&A
By Frank Ahrens
Vladimir Putin will grant an exclusive interview to National Public Radio tomorrow night, hours before the visiting Russian leader concludes his summit with President Bush and flies home.
After the one-on-one with NPR's Robert Siegel, Putin will answer telephone and e-mail questions from listeners, following the lead of Bill Clinton, who fielded caller questions on a Moscow radio and television talk show during his visit last year to Russia.
"It's a great coup," said Kevin Klose, NPR president and former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post from 1977 to 1981. Klose was instrumental in closing the deal with Putin's people, which has been in the works for the past month. "This is the first time, aside from Khrushchev's travels across the U.S., for the serious possibility of voice-to-voice exchange" with a Russian chief of state, Klose said. "It's amazing -- the president of the Russian Federation being questioned directly by individual citizens of the United States."
Klose read Putin's October speech to NATO in Brussels, in which he said the Sept. 11 terror attacks radically shifted global politics and will bring Russia into closer cooperation with the West. Afterward, Klose made his pitch to the Russian Embassy in Washington.
"We told them that, if this summit is truly a waypoint on this path, then the way to present that most seriously to the people of the U.S. is through NPR," Klose said. Putin sat for an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters earlier this month at the Kremlin, but this is his only one-on-one interview during his trip here.
The interview and listener questions should occupy about an hour, Klose said. There are no ground rules for the interview, he added.
A call late yesterday to the Russian Embassy press office was not returned.
Veteran "All Things Considered" host Siegel -- who was NPR's first foreign correspondent 21 years ago -- drew the assignment for the interview, which will be held at NPR's Manhattan studios at 7:30 p.m. One interpreter will translate questions into Russian for Putin, and another will translate Putin's answers into English.
"They told me last Thursday, 'You're doing the interview with Putin,' " Siegel said. "I was quite surprised and quite delighted."
Siegel is boning up by reading "First Person," a collection of interviews with Putin; plowing through a "tremendous number of clips" and picking the brains of former and current NPR Moscow correspondents.
The news dictates that Siegel will ask the Russian president about the U.S.-Russian alliance in the Afghanistan campaign, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, possible Russian membership in NATO, Putin's history as a KGB officer and so on.
But Siegel wants to get personal, too.
"I am curious about the man," Siegel said. "He is a very controlled, smart person, someone who seems to have navigated the bureaucracy incredibly shrewdly. And he's a very tough guy. He's someone who's learned discipline by fighting, by judo."
Listeners can submit e-mail questions to Putin at putin@npr.org.
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